In The Tank

Such attention to regulations is essential to the overriding aim of conservative think tanks, which is to influence policy not by lobbying politicians and civil servants directly, but by generating support among the public and having policy-makers move to take advantage of that support. The Fraser Institute’s genius lies in its catering to the middlemen in this equation: the media. To get its messages out, the institute knows just when to email exactly the right number of words for tomorrow’s newspapers and when to send graph-laden background reports instead. It works the phones and keeps in touch with the ever-changing cast of characters who make editorial decisions. It is, in a word, slick.

From a PR standpoint, the Fraser’s single most effective strategy is probably Tax Freedom Day, “the hypothetical date on which average Canadians have paid their tax bill for the year and started working for themselves.” The idea is so simple — a kind of statistical sound bite — that it became known and understood by, the institute claimed, “almost every adult Canadian.” Amid all the agitprop produced by the Fraser — including an incessant cry of liberal bias in the media at a time when Canada’s media outlets could hardly be more concentrated on the right — this claim at least seems accurate. Tax Freedom Day achieved lofty and mythological status by getting attention from newspapers from Charlottetown to Whitehorse. The political left has its doomsday clock (showing the number of minutes remaining until “catastrophic destruction”), but not many pay heed to it. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has its annual alternative federal budget, but few pay attention to a calculus that, among other things, includes environmental impacts of extractive industries. Given global warming, such an approach to political economy may be highly appropriate, but it lacks the panache, simplicity, and pocketbook immediacy of Tax Freedom Day.

In some ways, the influence of think tanks comes down to the question of whether the media, and especially newspapers, by allowing them so much space and attention, are abrogating editorial responsibility. Are newspapers, in effect, outsourcing the news? André Pratte, editor-in-chief of La Presse in Montreal, does not think so. “I am not afraid of think tanks, and I am not critical of the phenomenon itself,” he says, explaining that the frequency of news stories and op-ed pieces based on think tank research is simply due to the volume of reports put out. “Most of the think tanks obviously have an ideological bias of some kind, but they still think,” he says. He compares the risks involved in using such material to those arising from stories about poll results or news of supposed medical breakthroughs. The issue is whether newspapers are “careful enough, or maybe in some cases equipped, to question [further] once we’ve published the stuff . . . whether, for instance, the ideological bias had an impact [and] whether conclusions are based on facts or on a bias.” To Pratte’s way of thinking, then, editors shouldn’t worry about material generated by think tanks, but should try to follow up on such stories using their own resources.

Sounds reasonable enough. But how often does this actually happen at a time when newspaper editorial budgets are so tight, when small papers especially are ever more dependent on wire copy, and when large media corporations seek ways to use the same material for multiple platforms (print, radio, television, the Internet)?

Mary Janigan, who covered the public policy beat at Maclean’s for four years and is now on the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, stresses the journalistic danger of putting too much credence in the findings of any single think tank. She says we should compare a number of different ones on a given subject in order to reach a balanced view. Such a position is reasonable (even honourable), but there are pitfalls and realities. Raymond Brassard, the managing editor of Montreal’s Gazette, says, “We pretty much ignore” the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy, “because they write very long,” in contrast to, for example, the Fraser, which sends “stuff that is intended for op-ed page lengths, with some editing.” Based on newspaper coverage of last February’s Conference of Defence Association meeting, which discussed Canada’s role in Afghanistan, that organization also knows how to get the media’s attention. As does, for that matter, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.

Neil Reynolds is one of Canada’s most respected newspaper editors. He started as a reporter at the Sarnia Observer and later became an editorial executive at the Toronto Star. In 1975, he returned to his hometown, Kingston, Ontario, and transformed the Whig-Standard into a much-admired enterprise. He left the Whig in 1992 to become first the editor and then the editor-publisher of two Atlantic Canada dailies, the Telegraph-Journal and the Times-Globe, both in Saint John. Later, he reinvented the Ottawa Citizen, then became editor of the Vancouver Sun. His involvement in all these newspapers was characterized by a deep concern for journalistic ethics, the role of honest inquiry, and the use of narrative to bond newspapers to their readers. Neither the Whig nor the New Brunswick papers Reynolds oversaw, however, had a codified policy about identifying the apparent bias of individual think tanks. Rather, if an article was a pickup from the Canadian Press, for instance, the papers usually followed whatever labelling CP’s reporter or editor had chosen. This sometimes meant no classification at all. By contrast, the Citizen and the Vancouver Sun, like the other papers in what was then the Southam group (they are now part of Canwest Global Communications), had policies of assigning each think tank mentioned to one broad political category or another.

“As I recall,” Reynolds says, “the real drama came from a kind of guerrilla enforcement at the reporter or copy editor level. Liberal reporters and copy editors made damn sure that right wing went in front of the X Institute; conservative reporters and copy editors made damn sure that left wing went in front of the Y Institute.” He adds, “Once in a while, a left-wing writer would slip ‘extreme right wing’ in front of the Fraser Institute, at which point I got personally involved — ‘extreme right wing’ being code for SS torture and Nazi genocide.”

In Reynolds’ experience, some staff struggled to make clear not only their own viewpoints, but those of their employers as well. He believes this was common with editorial writers, who “loved to use pejorative adjectives to help them reflect the particular bias of their paper.” Does he feel references to think tanks, whether in the news hole or on the op-ed page, should characterize a think tank’s ideological orientation? “In Canada, yes. It’s unfortunate that this practice conveys a derogatory touch to what should be a neutral exercise. It just does. I think it’s different in the States, where there are an infinite variety of think tanks, many of which defy single-adjective labelling, many of which straddle ideological positions. My real concern at all of these papers was to find a way to report more aggressively on issues and ideas, and I exploited the think tanks to do it. At the Whig, [the managing editor] and I shared this thought. He got reporters to exploit left-wing think tanks; I got reporters to exploit right-wing ones. In the kind of anarchy we had there, it worked.”

At the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John, Reynolds assigned one writer full time to an ideas beat, and watched as “he went after think tanks, left and right, quite aggressively,” he says. “At the larger papers, with beat [and] parliamentary writers in place, the think tanks tended to get coverage as a matter of course. The disadvantage of this approach is that the studies produced by think tanks often get merely routine coverage — the five-paragraph or 600-word quick hit.” For editors, he notes, pragmatically and without cynicism, think tank handouts are a free “labour-saving device on a slow day,” and “leave the editor with more money to spend on an occasional commission of some kind.

“There’s the rub, I suspect. The reality of newsgathering in a free media age — when people read online or download material for the cost of paper and ink — is that the practice of paying professional journalists to do dogged reporting on public policy issues is less and less common. The think tanks, at once so loud and so very silent, are eager to step in and fill the void, free of charge. On both the left and right, they are eager to be content providers to their receptive hosts.